To Train Up a Child

Michael Pearl &
Debi Pearl

We live in a society where a bartender can be blamed for a drunk driver, where a gun manufacturer can be sued for a crime involving guns. The idea that the drunk driver or the shooter is responsible for his own actions is, today, ludicrous. I've always figured this is simply a product of unadulterated greed; in general, the bar has more money than the drunk, the gun manufacturer has more money than the shooter, and therefore they can pay a lot more in damages. The problem is that we've begun to believe that the gun manufacturer and the bartender really are to blame, in some ethical sense, for the actions of the drunk and the shooter. It's this that's ludicrous. We have lost the logical, sane idea of personal responsibility in today's society. And here we come to Lynn Paddock.

Lynn Paddock is, as I write this, in jail for killing one of her kids. A copy of the Pearls' To Train Up a Child was found in her home. Thus, attention turned towards the Pearls. To those of you of the right age range to think of such things, does this remind you of blaming suicides on the music of Judas Priest or "occult activity" (of which no one ever found conclusive proof anyway) on Dungeons and Dragons? How about the West Memphis Three? Let's face it: we're on the other side of the spectrum here, since it's usually the Christians accusing the Heathens, but when you scrape off the religious trappings, it sure sounds a lot like the same situation to yours truly. Is Lynn Paddock a demented, perhaps mentally defective woman who was instructed by the Pearls to kill her child? Or is the presence of the book at the scene as relevant as the presence of British Steel in the room of a kid who's just slit his wrists? (After all, there's a picture of a razorblade on the cover. See? Conclusive!)

When you're addressing anti-Pearl hysteria, as well, you have to address stoptherod.org, a grassroots organization devoted to stopping the Pearls, and others who believe in spanking children, in their tracks. Stoptherod's website even encourages people who haven't read the book to go to Amazon and post one-star reviews of it. Which explains all the one-star reviews of the book to be found there that say things like "I haven't read it, but I've seen excerpts, and..." (I cannot urge you strongly enough to report these reviews as inappropriate. What's more offensive-- a swear word or two, or writing a "review" of a book you've never read? If your answer is the former, and you're new to the reviewing practices of Goat Central, I strongly, strongly suggest you stop reading now.)

So why am I reviewing the book? Quite simple-- unlike the majority of the "reviewers" who have trashed the book at Amazon, I've actually read the silly thing. I'm drawn to controversy like a cat to the sound of a can opener. It has always seemed to me that where you find controversy, you find a lot of people spewing opinions that have no basis at all in fact. (Check the reviews for the book The Skeptical Environmentalist for another fine example of humanity at its lowest.) Someone needs to step in and provide a voice of, if not reason, at least direct experience with the material. Might as well be me.

And now, on with the show.

Ah, child abuse. One of the few topics that it seems to me the entire American populace can agree on. "Child abuse is awful! We must stamp it out!" And that's all well and good, you've got the million-man AND the million-mom march all ready to descend on Washington and demand a War on Child Abuse. Except there's one slight problem: define "child abuse." Ask those million men and those million moms, and you're going to get a whole lot of different answers. I think we can all agree that a child who is killed, or sent to the hospital, with broken bones, burns, or bruises directly caused by his parents is the victim of child abuse. After that, the picture gets a little murky. How about indirect cause? (The parent turns on a stove and the child touches it-- something that, in my youth, I believed happened to every child in the world.) How about nonparental abuse? (A great loophole here if anyone would have the guts to run with it-- prosecute school bullies under the child abuse laws.) How about emotional abuse? (A far too broad topic to go into in an Amazon review.) How about corporal punishment that leaves no lasting physical scars, commonly known as "spanking"?

Here we come to the crux of the situation as it relates to the book To Train Up a Child. There are people who believe that you should never, ever, ever spank a child, because spanking a child even once will lead to irrevocable damage, both physically and psychologically, to the child. (There are others who are against it who have no idea why, but we can't really address that particular pathology here.) I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing these are the same people who believe that driving drunk once will automatically cause you to get into an accident, or having one cigarette or one sip of wine while you're pregnant will cause massive birth defects. Let me put it as simply as I possibly can-- these people are wrong. If you align yourself with their way of thinking, you are wrong. We could sit here all day while I cite studies and point you towards various journals of medical and psychological science, but let's take a more pragmatic approach-- how long has humanity survived on this planet? (Depends on your religious beliefs, probably.) And during how much of that time have parents been disciplining their kids via corporal punishment? (I'll make it easy for you: 100% of the time.) Has the human race died out? (Are you sitting here reading this?)

But if you're reading this review, I think I'm playing the odds in stating that I think you either have an open mind towards the idea of corporal punishment or you're in favor of it. After all, why would you be thinking about buying this book if you were solidly anti-corporal punishment? (If you're here because sparetherod sent you to write a nasty review, and you haven't read the book, GO AWAY. You are not qualified to be posting here, and it is immoral and unethical for you to do so.) There is one other hurdle you have to get over, though, and this is a criticism of the book that even those in favor of corporal punishment may find valid: the Pearls advocate a behavior-modification method of child-rearing. In other words, yes, you will be conditioning your children much like Pavlov conditioned his dogs (or, more to the point, like the armed forces condition cadets). If you have a problem with that mindset, this book is not for you. But think about it: the kid-stove meme is universal because we've all done it. How did your parents teach you to stay away from the hot stove? There are basically two choices here: either they conditioned you to stay away from it, in which case you may not be as far away from the Pearls' thinking as you thought, or they allowed you to touch it so you'd do your own conditioning. In which case, you may not be as far away from the Pearls' thinking as you thought, though-- and this is a very, very important point in the context of this discussion-- at no time during this book do either of the Pearls ever counsel parents to let children make those sorts of mistakes. (And under that line of thinking, my parents were horribly abusive, because I was allowed to touch the stove. My parents may have their shortcomings, but they were never abusive.)

So: we know the Pearls advocate spanking, and we know the Pearls advocate conditioning. That may be enough to steer you away from the book. And if so, go in peace. It's probably not for you. For those of you still left, let's talk about Michael and Debi Pearl's book.

Once you're past the conditioning (which does seem a little weird at first), there's not too much here that doesn't logically follow. The Pearls are a great example of the fact that you can stress something far over and above what any normal person should need to do to make a point and people will still misread you. I have read this book, closely, from cover to cover, recently enough that it is still fresh in my mind; I finished it three days ago. As long as you do not consider corporal punishment to be child abuse, I can categorically state that there is nothing in this book that could possibly be construed as the Pearls counseling parents to abuse their children. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that the anti-Pearl factions are, by and large, populated by anti-spanking Nazis, and can thus be dismissed.

There is a good deal of logic in what Pearl says-- especially his oft-repeated line that training now will lead to being able to rest later. If your child is trained not to touch things that are not his as an infant, potty-trained as an infant (a lot of people seem to think the Pearls are out of their mind about this, but a friend of mine just told me about a deaf woman who trained her infant-- under six months old-- to sign her necessity to go to the toilet. Effectively, the child was toilet trained before she could walk!), trained to stay out of dangerous household situations as an infant, how much running around will you have to do after the child as a toddler? Or, worse, as a fifteen-year-old?

It's not a bad little book, really, as long as Michael Pearl isn't getting his Jesus on. He does towards the end of the book, which I found a tad surprising since he goes out of his way at the beginning to state that non-Christians can use his advice just as much as Christians can (a welcome, and surprising, change in the usual thinking of the "committed Christian" writer, to be sure). When he gets his Jesus on, he goes way overboard-- you can see the fire-and-brimstone preacher rising up behind his eyes in some passages, and some things he says are, not surprisingly, out of step with current thinking (the whole "barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen" routine rears its ugly head, which I found far more shocking than any counsel of corporal punishment). But that's confined to the book's final few chapters; his method of address is normally calm and level-headed, which is exactly how he counsels parents to discipline their children: in a calm and level-headed frame of mind. Will a calm parent beat a child hard enough to send it to the hospital or kill it? Most certainly not. And over and over again, Pearl tells us: if you're angry, let it slide until you've cooled off. Discipline must always be administered calmly. Is this what a person who's advocating child abuse says?

For a self-published book, it's surprisingly well-done. Now I grant you, the copy I read was the eighth edition, which is a lot of reprintings with which to correct one's spelling and grammatical errors. But I've read a few self-published tomes that have gone through many more editions (The Great IRS Hoax, for example, is getting close to its fourteenth revision) that are still peppered with spelling and grammatical errors. It's always nice to find a self-published work whose authors have taken care with the English language; that alone may be a reason to check this out.

For that matter, To Train Up a Child has been quite the self-publishing success story; it has sold more copies (over four hundred thousand) than any other self-published book I know of, and in fact more copies than any other micropress or POD title of which I'm aware. (For that matter, quite a few major press books can't claim that kind of sales figure). Which makes me wonder if there's not another motive to the storm of negative criticism that constantly lashes this book-- simple jealousy. That's a whole lot of copies moved, and a lot of influence being peddled. More of each, presumably, than anything advanced by the book's critics. Seems logical.

I never thought I, the most lax of heathens, would find myself defending a backwoods preacher for, well, preaching. But here we are. There are a lot of people out there who want to tar Michael and Debi Pearl with the kind of brush applied to Andrea Yates and Susan Smith. Nothing could be further from the truth. Don't believe me? Read the book and see for yourself. It's not great, but it's not the nightmare it's reported to be, either.